County Sued Over Bar to Activist

A lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union chapter here contends that county officials broke the law when they barred a welfare rights advocate from distributing leaflets outside two welfare offices or talking to applicants in the lobbies.

The suit, filed in federal court by a leading 1st Amendment attorney, alleges that Joni Halpern, executive director of the Supportive Parents Information Network, was denied access to offices in El Cajon and Chula Vista while representatives of other groups have been allowed.

“County welfare offices may not select certain groups to express their ideas on government property while silencing another just because they may not like what that group has to say,” said ACLU volunteer attorney Guylyn Cummins.

San Diego County officials declined to discuss the suit or the incidents involving Halpern and her group. But a deputy county counsel suggested that the issue might be resolved without a trip to court.

“We probably need to have more discussion with this group,” said deputy county counsel Bill Johnson. “If there are points of disagreement, we might be in the court, but I just can’t tell yet.”

Marian Kramer, an official with the Michigan-based National Welfare Rights Union, said that though cases in which activists have been blocked from welfare offices were once common, the practice has declined sharply because of litigation.

“I haven’t heard of anything like this in quite a while,” Kramer said. “In the past, when we heard about this kind of thing, we would just break right through with a lawsuit. We thought people had gotten the message.”

Gregory Knoll, chief counsel for the Legal Aid Society of San Diego, whose agency is not involved in the lawsuit, said his attorneys are regularly allowed to attend appeal hearings for welfare recipients. But he added that there is still a level of hostility toward applicants from some eligibility workers.

“There is still a lot of old-line thinking among workers that these folks will never be taxpayers and voters so they do not need to be treated with dignity,” Knoll said. “That’s just inappropriate.”

Like other welfare agencies across the country, the San Diego County Department of Health and Human Services has been under pressure from the federal government to apply new rules under a 1996 welfare reform law.

Under those rules, mothers with small children are eligible for just five years’ worth of payments and must find work or enroll in a training program almost immediately. Welfare rolls in San Diego County have been cut 40% since 1996.

Halpern, an attorney, said she is concerned that welfare workers may be shortchanging applicants by not advising them of educational opportunities and emergency food stamps. She attempted to distribute leaflets titled “Learn What You Can Do to Change Things!”

After being denied access to the welfare office in Chula Vista, Halpern led a picket line outside that office. The lawsuit seeks to force the county to permit access for Halpern to hand out information and to counsel applicants.

One issue to be resolved is whether the county has an overall policy on permitting groups to use county property or whether decisions are made on a case-by-case basis by individual office managers.

“Our whole thing is to try to put parents in the driver’s seat,” Halpern said. “It’s like people are starved for information.”